NDA for MMORPG: any use?
PostPosted:Thu Oct 22, 2009 7:57 pm
Traditionally MMORPGs have NDAs for betas until WoW went with the no NDA policy. Now I don't think it's so much as not having a NDA works as opposed to having NDA does not work. In a MMORPG you're presumably here for the long haul. It's not like a game where if you can fool a million people once to buy your game then you can retire with that money and never worry about what happens after.
Let's say you got some really great idea in your beta. Well it will get copied in something like 30 seconds after the game is released anyway assuming it is something that is truly awesome. Consider the genre is pretty mature, I doubt you're going to come up with some concept nobody has ever thought of before that requires some kind of systematic change. For example if you take the Emblem system in WoW, I can't imagine that will take more than a week to implement from a code point of view assuming your game has any kind of reasonable currency system in place. Now of course coming up with the content to fit such a system can take much longer, but there's no technical hurdle involved here. Good ideas can easily be stolen by other games, and it is readily apparent in MMORPG.
In fact the only good idea I've seen that's not stolen immediately is the offense/defense target windows, and here I can see if your UI assumes there is only one target, it can be rather difficult to allow 2. But that's the only exception I can think of.
Now on the other hand, if your game sucks, since MMORPG are all about sustained numbers, even if you somehow fooled people into buying the next product, that just means they'll cancel 1 month later.
There seems to be no competitive advantage in MMORPG that is gained by NDAs, but you'll definitely lose a lot of free publicity you otherwise could have got if the game was actually good.
Let's say you got some really great idea in your beta. Well it will get copied in something like 30 seconds after the game is released anyway assuming it is something that is truly awesome. Consider the genre is pretty mature, I doubt you're going to come up with some concept nobody has ever thought of before that requires some kind of systematic change. For example if you take the Emblem system in WoW, I can't imagine that will take more than a week to implement from a code point of view assuming your game has any kind of reasonable currency system in place. Now of course coming up with the content to fit such a system can take much longer, but there's no technical hurdle involved here. Good ideas can easily be stolen by other games, and it is readily apparent in MMORPG.
In fact the only good idea I've seen that's not stolen immediately is the offense/defense target windows, and here I can see if your UI assumes there is only one target, it can be rather difficult to allow 2. But that's the only exception I can think of.
Now on the other hand, if your game sucks, since MMORPG are all about sustained numbers, even if you somehow fooled people into buying the next product, that just means they'll cancel 1 month later.
There seems to be no competitive advantage in MMORPG that is gained by NDAs, but you'll definitely lose a lot of free publicity you otherwise could have got if the game was actually good.